Meet the Fearless Filmmakers Taking on ISIS in City of Ghosts

Matthew Heineman and Abdul-Aziz al-Hamza pose for a photo during the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival's premiere of City of Ghosts.

By Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images.

“Aziz, put the phone away,” director Matthew Heineman whispers to Abdul-Aziz Alhamza, the primary subject of the award-winning documentary City of Ghosts. He doesn’t listen. And it’s O.K.

Aziz is the Syrian co-founder of Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, the citizen journalist collective that has paid to smuggle images out from what is ostensibly ISIS’s capital with their lives and the lives of their loved ones. “I swear I am not just texting at girls,” Aziz, 25, says with a smile when I gesture toward his texting, as the three of us chat in a Chelsea conference room. “I am just following up on something.” I ask if it’s odd to hear Heineman discuss an intimate moment of his psychological trauma in storytelling terms. “We are used to hearing each other,” he shrugs. “This is, like, interview no. 1,000.”

City of Ghosts, in theaters July 7 before coming to Amazon, has been hitting the festival circuit hard, and opening eyes along the way. The film works on a number of levels. It’s not just about what’s happening in Syria; it’s the story about getting the story. It contains brutal footage of ISIS terrorizing the citizens of Raqqa but also, and perhaps even more repellant, the quite slick, Hollywood-style propaganda videos that ISIS produces to lure new recruits. A sequence I’ll never forget: watching Aziz’s colleague Hamoud watch the execution video of his father, which is shot, edited, and scored in the manner of an action-thriller.

How can a filmmaker be so bold as to ask someone to revisit that? “He told me, as he says to you, the audience, that watching it gives him strength,” Heineman explains. “It’s something he does, so we filmed him watching it.”

Heineman, whose previous film Cartel Land was nominated for an Academy Award, embedded his crew with Aziz’s group, who were first exiled to Turkey and are now in Germany. That intimacy is the movie’s primary selling point. “We didn’t want talking heads; this is showing, not telling,” Heineman says. That meant putting a small crew in safe houses, bunkering with people who clearly need sleep as they wait for calls from their sources still in Raqqa, hitting refresh on their laptops, and updating Facebook from their phones.

Aziz, whose “not terrible English” granted him the role of spokesperson, was a student when the Arab Spring spread to Syria. As democratic sentiment pushed against the Assad regime, a power vacuum was created just in time for ISIS to plant their black flag in Aziz’s hometown of Raqqa. Among ISIS’s primary weapons was propaganda, so it fell to brave individual citizens to leak the truth.

“The only way to get information out was to upload to YouTube and Facebook, and then the images were picked up by TV channels and newspapers,” Aziz explains. “But right now, ISIS is using the same tools. Videos go up and then Facebook or Twitter shut them down, but sometimes it takes a day or a week or a month until they discover it. Facebook closed our page two times and cut us off worldwide, assuming we were a terrorist group.”

Facebook is by far the most important tool (the group is now verified), and I ask what Aziz thinks about rumors of its founder Mark Zuckerberg getting into politics. “Facebook was not created just for helping my town. It was also for creating thousands of millions of billions of dollars. Mark has knowledge of technology, but I don’t . . .” His voice trails off. “But maybe it could be so?”

One of the more striking sequences in the film is set at an anti-immigration march in Germany. Angry “populists” bark about the purity of their nation. Either they’re completely unaware that these people literally have nowhere else to go, or maybe they just don’t care. (Aziz’s brother died trying to flee Syria for the West, a fate not uncommon for migrants.)

“They have no idea,” Aziz says, a little wearily. “I got to talk with some of them. They have no knowledge about what is going on. I tell them there is a war in Syria. I say Al-Qaeda. They say, ’what’s Al-Qaeda’? This is someone who has been living on Mars.”

City of Ghosts uses Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently’s win of the International Press Freedom Award in New York as a framing device. It’s certainly a nice gesture, but it shouldn’t lead one to think that the good guys have already won. “This is an international issue now,” Aziz says, suggestive of terror attacks in Europe and the United States that have been linked or inspired by ISIS. “It is a proxy war between the U.S., Russia, Turkey, Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS, tens and tens of groups. It won’t just be solved by the locals.”

Before any change can come, we need facts. That’s where this group, and this movie, comes in.